SSP debate, part 2: Jessica Polka opposing “the open access movement has failed”

In opposition to my speech supporting the motion “the open access movement has failed”, here’s what Jessica Polka said in opposition to the motion.

The open access movement has not failed. It is in the process of succeeding.

Indeed, over 50% of papers are now open access. And this proportion is set to increase, for three reasons:

1. Top-down leadership
2. (Overdue) attention to cost and equity
3. New filters

First, top-down leadership.

Richard Poynder argues that the movement has failed because “ownership” of the movement has been handed to universities and funders. To quote him:

OA was conceived as something that researchers would opt into. The assumption was that once the benefits of open access were explained to them, researchers would voluntarily embrace it – primarily by self-archiving their research in institutional or preprint repositories. But while many researchers were willing to sign petitions in support of open access, few (outside disciplines like physics) proved willing to practice it voluntarily.

Fundamentally, I agree. Individual scholars are still too hamstrung by their incentives to act alone, without the strength of collective action. Free thinking and individualism are prized in academia, with investigators evaluated based on how unique and iconoclastic their individual contributions are. And, in this competitive environment, sticking your head above the sand to question the rules of the game – the rules by which everyone who is evaluating you has succeeded – is not a recipe for success.

This is why I am grateful that funders, governments, and coalitions are finally stepping in at scale to change the rules. I believe it is the only pragmatic solution to this wicked problem. I’ll share some examples.

When discussing coordinated support for open access, we have to begin where the movement began: Latin America, which has been leading the way in coordinated support. For a quarter of a century, the publicly funded bibliographic database SciELO, based in Brazil, has been providing free access to scholarly journals. There are now over 1.2 million articles from over 1,600 journals in collections representing 16 different countries in south and central america and Africa.

And in 2018, a coalition called AmeliCA, which stands for OPen Knowledge in Latin America and the Global South, launched to strengthen partnerships between academic institutions and publishing infrastructure. 400+ journals, nearly 3,000 books, and 100 institutional repositories have joined.

But even outside of Latin America, in the last few years, we have seen prominent funders establish public access policies.

Europe has been making serious inroads since the establishment of the open access provisions of Horizon 2020. And when cOAlition S formed in 2018, it represented an unprecedented commitment to coordinate among governments and philanthropic organizations in support of open access.

In 2021, UNESCO released a recommendation on open science, elevating the cause to an international stage, and providing a strong moral imperative for individual governments to take action.

And in 2022, the United States White House Office of Science and Technology Policy released the Nelson memo, which ensured zero-embargo public access to federally-funded literature. When this takes effect at the end of 2025, we are going to see even greater strides towards open access and open data.

Second, we are seeing some movement on cost and equity. That’s long overdue, but at least it’s happening.

The declaration of the 2002 Budapest Open Access Initiative suggested that open access publishing would lower costs, and promote equity by “shar[ing] the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich.”

In fact, the concept of an article processing charge wasn’t even mentioned in the principles. Instead, the authors wrote:

Because price is a barrier to access, these new journals will not charge subscription or access fees, and will turn to other methods for covering their expenses. There are many alternative sources of funds for this purpose, including the foundations and governments that fund research, the universities and laboratories that employ researchers, endowments set up by discipline or institution, friends of the cause of open access, profits from the sale of add-ons to the basic texts, funds freed up by the demise or cancellation of journals charging traditional subscription or access fees, or even contributions from the researchers themselves. There is no need to favor one of these solutions over the others for all disciplines or nations, and no need to stop looking for other, creative alternatives.

Unfortunately, the creative alternative (that is to say, the article processing charge) created by the publishing industry is coming at a high cost. APCs increased 50 percent from 2010 to 2019. And with individual APCs reaching in to the six figures, it’s no surprise that in 2022, OSTP estimated that American taxpayers are already paying $390 to $798 million annually to publish federally funded research.

That’s why it’s so damaging that many recent policies, like the Nelson memo and plan S, don’t go far enough to reduce economic exploitation. Instead, the Nelson memo directs federal agencies to, quote, “allow researchers to include reasonable publication costs […] as allowable expenses in all research budgets,” which implies support for article processing charges. This model creates major challenges for researchers WITHOUT federal or other funds, to say nothing of those in low and middle income countries, or in fields where resources are less plentiful.

But, there is a light at the end of the tunnel.

In May 2023, the European Union’s council of ministers called for a “no pay” model, in which costs for disseminating and evaluating research are paid directly by institutions and funders. This can be achieved in several ways, including with “diamond” open access journals. CoAlition S’s responsible publishing proposal is another acknowledgement of the need for fundamental change. And the new Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation policy, which prevents the payment of APCs from grant funds, is a strong signal that the system is being questioned.

And the third reason open access will succeed: new filters.

Richard Poynder questions the very benefits of having information publicly accessible, given current developments around mis- and disinformation. He argues for having a “membrane between scientific research and the chaotic mess of false and arbitrary information that swirls around the web.”

Yes, preprints, the financial incentives around open access, and other forms of open publishing do tip the balance away from gatekeeping and toward inclusion. This means that the rate of spurious knowledge available is going to increase.

However, it also lulls us out of a false sense of security in a system that NEVER was equipped to form a fool-proof defense against misinformation. For proof of that, you can look back to the Wakefield paper, or to the current papermill crisis.

Instead, we need a better immune system for misinformation. To me, this looks like moving away from a model in which 2-3 invited peers, who cannot possibly be experts in everything covered in a highly interdisciplinary paper with 30 co-authors, are rushed to give their evaluation at a time when they are not at liberty to discuss the paper with their colleagues. Then, all the information about whether a paper is rigorous or interesting (and to whom) gets compressed down into a single value – the title of the journal in which it is published.

Luckily, many journals are conducting transparent review, in which the reports are published. But, In order to create a system that is powerful enough to identify and correct problems in the literature, we need to disseminate research to large audiences BEFORE putting a stamp of approval on it. We need to disentangle the functions of traditional journals into a “publish, review, curate” model in which preprints and other means of sharing research are the first step, and the entire community can then discuss the work together.

And beyond that, we need to continue to experiment with new ways of organizing knowledge altogether – and this is what we are seeking to support at Astera.

For example, there are many exciting experiments in publishing: integrating code with narratives (like the Notebooks Now initiative from AGU), micropublications (which are single figure papers), publishing individual modules that can be linked together (for example, Octopus.ac), creating machine-readable nanopublications (which break knowledge down into triples: a subject, predicate, and object), discourse graphs (that create knowledge graphs out of evidence and ideas), and many others.

These threads are going to come together to create a future in which knowledge is shared and interpreted in completely new ways. The success of the open access movement is going to both lay the foundation for, and maximize the benefits of, this technological transformation.